5 ms·

Former cracker for rzr here :) did not do this game unfortunately.

by enos_feedler 3y ago

effingwewt 3y ago
Thank you for your service o7
apgwoz 3y ago
Oh, you "didn't" do this game, wink wink, nudge nudge. ;)
pizzafeelsright 3y ago
Question for you from the 17 year old me. Why did you do this? Fame? Money? Challenge? I didn't know enough to so it myself and no one would teach me.
- blagie 3y ago
  Having done similar (not identical) things at that age, a lot of it is quite literally for the LOLs, and more than a bit is for community identity. Fame: Non-existent, since you don't tell people. Money: Non-existent, you don't get paid. In retrospect, I think a major drivers for teenagers for a lot of activities is a sense of identity. You feel like one of the role models in [name your favorite hacker movie]. It's the same reason why punks wore spikes and mohawks, goths wore black, and people might pick a genre of music (even if privately). I'd guess a lot of more negative things, like vandalism, are similar too. You become part of a community too. And ultimately, you contribute to it. As much as it might be illegal, cracking software helps other kids who can't afford that software. Few real engineers will use a hacked copy of AutoCAD, and literally everyone I know began to pay for music once they could afford it. On the other end of the bell curve are kids who can't afford those. Providing them with access is a community service. And it's going up against The Man. It's illegal, but by the code of ethics we followed at the time, it was very ethical.
- joshmn 3y ago
  I've done something similar in recent past on a large scale: I did it because it was interesting, I wanted to prove DRM is a flawed concept and broken construct, and because the community which I built (as a result) was really great and a home to me when I didn't ever experience one. It was never about money or fame, it was about providing something to people that had a value. People said the "thing" I provided was better than the "real thing", and that gave me a sense of pride: I'd never get hired by the company that made "real thing" to make their "thing" better because I didn't have the credentials on paper. But at least my "thing" was better.
- Agingcoder 3y ago
  It’s a great way to learn - so challenge. There’s neither fame nor money here I think. At least in the 90s there were lots of tutorials to learn how to crack/reverse engineer, from +orc’s documentation to fravia ´s fortress of reverse engineering - I’d expect similar tutorials to still be around. Reverse engineering also happens to be a very useful skill as a regular software engineer ( debugging compiler bugs, figuring out why software X is behaving strangely and what it is doing etc ).
  - rmilk 3y ago
    Exactly true. Was a teenage software hacker, reverse engineered many games mostly because I was a bored teenager with free time and many games I legitimately bought. Mostly it was to cheat a little, like tweaking player stats or number of lives in a save file. All that reverse engineering experience gave me a particularly useful talent as a developer: an uncanny ability to sit down and grok other people’s code almost like magic. Solid experience with reverse engineering really is a good skill to have.
    - wink 3y ago
      Depends on when the people did this and how complex the mechanism were at the time. I do remember just learning about JMP in assembler and that you could bypass a lot of stuff by changing a true to false or vice versa. Not exactly rocket science. (Not saying this to downplay anything, but what seems magical to many non-techies was actually very easy to do if you knew the trick, and it already worked for like 30% of the games - I'm not talking about the real stuff later on, not even sure how complicated NoCD was.) On the other hand, probably 15-20 years after I had last used a crack for a game I had to implement some basic protection like this into a piece of software (more like: make sure the customer will not run this demo version forever) and it was fun to discuss in the team what we all remembered from back then and which measures were adequate to implement.
- enos_feedler 3y ago
  I did it for unlimited access to t3 zero day ftp sites
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Former cracker for rzr here :) did not do this game unfortunately.

effingwewt 3y ago

Thank you for your service o7

apgwoz 3y ago

Oh, you "didn't" do this game, wink wink, nudge nudge. ;)

pizzafeelsright 3y ago

Question for you from the 17 year old me. Why did you do this? Fame? Money? Challenge? I didn't know enough to so it myself and no one would teach me.

blagie 3y ago
Having done similar (not identical) things at that age, a lot of it is quite literally for the LOLs, and more than a bit is for community identity. Fame: Non-existent, since you don't tell people. Money: Non-existent, you don't get paid. In retrospect, I think a major drivers for teenagers for a lot of activities is a sense of identity. You feel like one of the role models in [name your favorite hacker movie]. It's the same reason why punks wore spikes and mohawks, goths wore black, and people might pick a genre of music (even if privately). I'd guess a lot of more negative things, like vandalism, are similar too. You become part of a community too. And ultimately, you contribute to it. As much as it might be illegal, cracking software helps other kids who can't afford that software. Few real engineers will use a hacked copy of AutoCAD, and literally everyone I know began to pay for music once they could afford it. On the other end of the bell curve are kids who can't afford those. Providing them with access is a community service. And it's going up against The Man. It's illegal, but by the code of ethics we followed at the time, it was very ethical.
joshmn 3y ago
I've done something similar in recent past on a large scale: I did it because it was interesting, I wanted to prove DRM is a flawed concept and broken construct, and because the community which I built (as a result) was really great and a home to me when I didn't ever experience one. It was never about money or fame, it was about providing something to people that had a value. People said the "thing" I provided was better than the "real thing", and that gave me a sense of pride: I'd never get hired by the company that made "real thing" to make their "thing" better because I didn't have the credentials on paper. But at least my "thing" was better.
Agingcoder 3y ago
It’s a great way to learn - so challenge. There’s neither fame nor money here I think. At least in the 90s there were lots of tutorials to learn how to crack/reverse engineer, from +orc’s documentation to fravia ´s fortress of reverse engineering - I’d expect similar tutorials to still be around. Reverse engineering also happens to be a very useful skill as a regular software engineer ( debugging compiler bugs, figuring out why software X is behaving strangely and what it is doing etc ).
- rmilk 3y ago
  Exactly true. Was a teenage software hacker, reverse engineered many games mostly because I was a bored teenager with free time and many games I legitimately bought. Mostly it was to cheat a little, like tweaking player stats or number of lives in a save file. All that reverse engineering experience gave me a particularly useful talent as a developer: an uncanny ability to sit down and grok other people’s code almost like magic. Solid experience with reverse engineering really is a good skill to have.
  - wink 3y ago
    Depends on when the people did this and how complex the mechanism were at the time. I do remember just learning about JMP in assembler and that you could bypass a lot of stuff by changing a true to false or vice versa. Not exactly rocket science. (Not saying this to downplay anything, but what seems magical to many non-techies was actually very easy to do if you knew the trick, and it already worked for like 30% of the games - I'm not talking about the real stuff later on, not even sure how complicated NoCD was.) On the other hand, probably 15-20 years after I had last used a crack for a game I had to implement some basic protection like this into a piece of software (more like: make sure the customer will not run this demo version forever) and it was fun to discuss in the team what we all remembered from back then and which measures were adequate to implement.
enos_feedler 3y ago
I did it for unlimited access to t3 zero day ftp sites

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]